Over at windows7sins.org you can check out what the Free Software Foundation has to say about Windows 7 and how it is enslaving the computer world. Let’s take a look at some of

their arguments.

1. Poisoning education: Today, most children whose education involves computers are being taught to use one company’s product: Microsoft’s. Microsoft spends large sums on lobbyists and marketing to corrupt educational departments. An education using the power of computers should be a means to freedom and empowerment, not an avenue for one corporation to instill its monopoly.

Hmmm…when I was in school we learned on Apple computers. Come to think of it, my 16 year old son was given a Macbook to use in school. It’s not all Microsoft where I’m from and from what I have read it is not uncommon, nor has it been for a long time, to find Apple computer products in quite a few schools. Go figure. Why not slam Apple as well, they are proprietary. One large thing that FSF is forgetting here is that most school departments do not have the money to pay for an IT staff to take care of software problems on computers that are running open source software, no I am not saying Windows doesn’t break. If a school system was to implement a Linux distribution on their systems there would be a learning curve for both staff and students, point being that Linux is easy to break and harder to fix when you break it. Not to mention that there are so many Linux distributions out there that it would be quite a process just to decide which one to go with.

3. Monopoly behavior: Nearly every computer purchased has Windows pre-installed — but not by choice. Microsoft dictates requirements to hardware vendors, who will not offer PCs without Windows installed on them, despite many people asking for them. Even computers available with other operating systems like GNU/Linux pre-installed often had Windows on them first.

What? Why does this just sound wrong to me. There are not many, but if I want a computer with Linux on it I know of more then a few places I can order one and even some I can walk into and buy it. I personally think this is a supply and demand issue, most people know Windows and stick with what they know. Why would a company sell computers with only Linux on them when most of their potential customers are asking for Windows? I know there are a couple of companies that do this but the demand is not in their favor. This sounds like if I wanted to open a PC manufacturing company Microsoft would be on my door with a big stick saying “put Windows on your computers are you’ll be sorry”. Not likely. Microsoft doesn’t need to do this…the market dictates it.

4. Lock-in: Microsoft regularly attempts to force updates on its users, by removing support for older versions of Windows and Office, and by inflating hardware requirements. For many people, this means having to throw away working computers just because they don’t meet the unnecessary requirements for the new Windows versions.

Microsoft is not the only one who does this, the entire software industry does this. Although Linux in general requires lower standards of hardware to run on, even they are guilty of upping the minimum hardware requirements. Take a very popular Linux distribution like Ubuntu, they keep adding features and eye candy to their open source OS and let me tell you from experience, Ubuntu 9.04 may not need the hardware that Windows Vista would need but it certainly needs better hardware then Ubuntu 7.04 needed. Ever heard of Moore’s law, well software fits in there somehow, not just Microsoft either.

6. Enforcing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM): With Windows Media Player, Microsoft works in collusion with the big media companies to build restrictions on copying and playing media into their operating system. For example, at the request of NBC, Microsoft was able to prevent Windows users from recording television shows that they have the legal right to record.

I think the entertainment industry and their lawyers have quite a bit to do with this one. DRM is a fact of life, get used to it. Oh…by the way…Apple is much worse then Microsoft when it comes to DRM.

7. Threatening user security: Windows has a long history of security vulnerabilities, enabling the spread of viruses and allowing remote users to take over people’s computers for use in spam-sending botnets. Because the software is secret, all users are dependent on Microsoft to fix these problems — but Microsoft has its own security interests at heart, not those of its users.

So if Microsofts software wasn’t secret, we would all be programmers and could fix the security vulnerabilities ourselves? Not! Let me clue you in on something, Microsoft is targeted by malware due to it’s market share. If the situation was reversed and Linux had most of the operating system market it would be the target of malware creators instead of Microsoft, if you believe otherwise you are foolish.

I know I am probably coming off like an MS fan boy here but I do a lot of tinkering with Linux and there are quite a few distributions that I really like. I am really fond of Linux Mint especially. It’s just that being in IT I have a hard time reading the rants on sites like windows7sins.org and not thinking “zealot much”. Seriously, if you want to do your cause a favor…tone it down a bit, you may have a couple of points but I personally think you went a little overboard and that makes it hard to swallow.